Limitations

The following search limitations apply in Espacenet:

• Maximum of ten search terms per field.
• Maximum of 20 search terms and 19 operators per mask.
• Left truncation not supported.
• Slashes can only be used for date entries and CPC /IPC symbol entries.
• Applicant /inventor names are not searchable in documents published in other character sets (Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese etc.).
• Diacritical characters (umlauts and accents) and slashes are not allowed when searching in the worldwide database.
• Stop words - common words such as FOR, WITH, THE, BUT, AND, OF, ANY, etc. - are not searchable as they would otherwise produce too many results.
• You cannot retrieve an XP document with the name of the author or limit a search to XP documents only.
• Some documents cannot be found using keywords as they do not have translated titles.

The following limitations apply to results in Espacenet:

• Maximum of 100 000 results per query but only the first 500 matching documents are listed.
• EP and WO documents with up to 500 pages can be downloaded in a single operation.
• Other patent documents with up to 250 pages can be downloaded in a single operation.
• Maximum of 100 documents stored in My patents list for one year.
• You can save a maximum of 50 queries in the query history .
• The download function in My patents list only works if the number of pages does not exceed 500 pages.
• The sort function is only available when the result list contains fewer than 500 hits.
• Lists can be only exported page by page (in other words, 30 documents in compact mode, 15 in extended mode.
• No statistical analysis possible. See the annual report and at the following page .